5 - Admiranda et Imitanda? Emulation of the Holy Harlot Type by Late Medieval Female Mystics

Summary

The first four chapters of this book have established the malleability of the holy harlot type as a model for Everyman, an example of multivalent femininity that lent itself particularly well for use in expressing reformist and radical religious concepts. The repentant harlot provided Bernard of Clairvaux with an overarching model for his articulation of the Soul's ascension from sin to salvation. The harlot saint was constituted as the ideal preacher and “true man” by Wycliffites. While one of the main arguments of this monograph is that the flexibility of the repentant prostitute model indeed permitted its universal adoption as a model for imitation, especially for reformist ideas, it was still more relevant for women, especially those who sought non-traditional paths to a religious life, sometimes after having lived in and for the world. This last chapter reveals that women did indeed make use of the holy harlot model (particularly Mary Magdalene), but also that they did so to break new ground, to support their right to publicise their own voices and their sometimes dissenting beliefs. Female mystics in the later medieval period imitated harlot saints to break away from tradition, to do new things, discuss original concepts and find a new way to exist and thrive as religious women; women whose authority was respected, at least by some, because of their use of the holy harlot model. This survey of female visionaries will span from the twelfth-century mystic Christina of Markyate to the early sixteenth-century so-called Holy Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, by way of the two late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.

Imitation of well-established and authoritative models for the purpose of gaining in legitimacy is an instinctive and natural process. Hagiographic archetypes are some of the most potentially disruptive models to emulate. They enjoy great authority and prestige because they are anchored in a distant and sacred past, but continue to live on in popular cults and legends, providing them with an immediacy that renders them difficult to control. This leads medieval preachers and churchmen to agree that saints’ lives were to be admired, but not imitated: admiranda, sed non imitanda, and this especially for women emulating female saints.